Cat Fever is contagious
It began with a mouse.
Virginia-native Blake Thomas studies renewable energy in the College of Natural Resources as a graduate student at USU. He also makes music and is the owner of a tabby cat named Odysseus, or Ody for short. Thomas’ band, Cat Fever, released their first extended play, or EP, this month. While Ody is the band mascot, Thomas said the band name has a different origin.
A year and a half ago, Thomas lived in a house in Logan’s “Island” neighborhood and was “a dog person,” he said. Then he was bitten by a mouse in the night.
“It was the creepiest thing of all time,” he said. “I had to go get a tetanus booster and it was fine, but it was just kind of a creepy experience.”
The next day, Thomas and some friends took a road trip to Portland, where cats followed him everywhere, he said.
“It was this weird, almost mystic feeling while in Portland,” Thomas said. “Everywhere I was going, there was a cat following me.”
He said he slept at a friend’s house and woke with a cat on his chest, by his side and later on the tire of his car.
“All of a sudden they became these noble creatures that protected me from mice,” Thomas said. “Then I just fell deeply in love with cats. I guess you could say I got cat fever, and that’s where the name came from.”
Thomas said he started making music when received his first acoustic guitar at the end of high school. He said he would casually pick out favorite songs from his favorite band, Red House Painter, and learn them. He said he wasn’t in a band until he came to USU from and became a part of the group F Dragon with friends.
“It was almost like a parody,” Thomas said of F Dragon. “It was just kind of unreverent rock, or obnoxious rock, or something like that … one quarter serious and three quarters really goofy.”
When members of F Dragon moved and graduated, he started writing his own songs and eventually recording with Clint Holgate, a senior majoring in psychology. Holgate recorded and mixed the EP in his own home, Thomas said.
“He’s just really great at what he does,” Thomas said. “It’s really high quality.”
Holgate said he is not new to making EPs.
“I have been doing recording for a really long time,” Holgate said. “This project was real
ly fun.”
Holgate said Thomas wrote and sang his music on an acoustic guitar and Holgate later added effects to lend the music a full-band feel. He said the EP took a year to make because he and Thomas did not work on it consistently and took several breaks.
“For the most part it was just him and I sitting around and trying different instruments out and experimenting,” Holgate said.
He said he enjoyed wearing the producer’s hat for Cat Fever and stressed the importance of diplomacy between artist and producer.
“It’s important when you’re doing music with people, especially as a producer and not just an engineer … to have good chemistry,” Holgate said. “You spend a lot of time together and sometimes you have opposing ideas, and it’s good to know that, hey, this is your friend and it’s going to be OK even if we disagree.”
Said chemistry helped Thomas with scattered Cat Fever performances in 2013. He said he borrowed members from Holgate’s band Good Blood to be his “backing band.”
The Cat Fever collaboration did not end there; Thomas describes his band as “elastic” and said he often recruits any available local musicians to rehearse and play live with him.
One recruit was Taylor Ross Wilson, former USU student and frontman of local band Little Barefoot. Wilson said he knew Thomas from playing in shows with F Dragon, but didn’t know him personally until Thomas asked him to play the keyboard in Cat Fever’s first show last April. He said Thomas recently asked him to begin playing live with Cat fever again and he agreed, this time to play the drums.
“I’m down to do whatever for the project,” Wilson said.
He said he’ll stick around, too.
“I’ll be happy to play with him as long as he asks me to,” Wilson said. “I like playing with him and I like the music.”
Wilson isn’t the only one who likes the sound of Cat Fever.
“I feel like it’s gone well,” Thomas said. “Everybody that has heard it has been really supportive and receptive.”
The Cat Fever EP, “Mountain”, is available at catfever.bandcamp.com, with the option to “name your price.”
“Anybody that’s willing to donate we’d be extremely grateful about, But more importantly is we want people to have the music and for it to spread,” Thomas said.
He said he still has hope of future generous donors.
“I’m still waiting for old family members to discover our music and make like a $2,500 donation,” Thomas said. “That hasn’t happened yet but we’re optimistic, and if it doesn’t happen, that’s OK too.”
It was a family member, Thomas’ uncle, who inspired the first song on the Cat Fever EP. Thomas said his uncle Dana was the only musically gifted member of the family.
“He had cancer,” Thomas said. “When he first started to get sick and he had a lot of time, and he just started calling me really frequently. The more and more that we talked, it was very much just a kindred spirit kind of connection. … It was this really neat connection we made right at the tail end of his life.”
Thomas said his uncle shared his taste in music and supported his musical endeavors.
“He sent me two guitars because he knew I was getting into it,” he said of his uncle.
Thomas said his uncle was a collector and sent the two electric guitars from California.
“That’s what I played my first shows on, the guitars from him,” Thomas said. “That’s a lot of why that first song is Uncle Dana, and I feel this strong connection with him in terms of music … I wanted to give some kind of tribute to him.”
Thomas said he also draws inspiration from other music. Wilson described the sound of Cat Fever as “ambient” and Wilson called it “ambient” and “something that you can get lost in a little bit.”
“The best thing I could say is readers should just go listen to it, because it’s all online and everything,” Wilson said.
Thomas said Cat Fever fans can expect more live performances in 2014.
“Because I have such a rigorous schedule and our band is so elastic, it’s hard to play live shows,” he said. “It’s just really, really hard to hammer down a date where the stars can align and we can have time to practice and play a good show … This semester I’m working on tightening up a new lineup to play live.”
-noelle.johansen@aggiemail.usu.edu
Twitter: broelle